Depuis que l’État des Comores est devenu membre de l’Organisation, en 1977, diverses interventions ont été mises en oeuvre dans le secteur de l’alimentation et de l’agriculture. L’assistance a concerné le renforcement des capacités et des institutions et la formulation des politiques, et un appui direct a été fourni pour des projets de développement.

Since Comoros joined the Organization in 1977, a variety of interventions have been delivered across the food and agriculture sector. Assistance has included capacity building, institutional strengthening and policy formulation as well as direct support to development projects. Current cooperation efforts are geared towards increasing agricultural production, particularly food products, and protecting natural resources – with an emphasis on agroforestry development. Strengthening agricultural data collection and information systems is another priority area.

Over the past decades, progress towards Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) in Africa has been made at national and subregionallevels. At national level, 43 African countries have developed specific forest law and 40 have a national forest policy. At subregionallevel, efforts to harmonize policies and programmeshave resulted in the development of the Convergence Plan of the Central African Forests Commission and the Convergence Plan for the Sustainable Management and Use of Forest Ecosystems in West Africa.

Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) have emerged as the main tool for defining, communicating and potentially reporting party contributions to the Paris Agreement on climate change. Agroforestry has been identified as a key part of most developing country NDCs, hence it is a potentially important contributor to global climate objectives. This policy brief seeks to explore the degree to which agroforestry is represented in current NDCs ambitions, how its application is envisaged and how its contribution could be enhanced.

Degraded lands—lands that have lost some degree of their natural productivity through human activity—account for over 20 percent of forest and agricultural lands in Latin America and the Caribbean. Some 300 million hectares of the region’s forests are considered degraded, and about 350 million hectares are now classified as deforested. The agriculture and forestry sectors are growing and exerting great pressure on natural areas. With the region expected to play an increasingly important role in global food security, this pressure will continue to ratchet up.

Background

The need to increase water productivity is a growing global concern as the World Commission on Water has estimated that demand for water will increase by c. 50% over the next 30 years and approximately half of the world's population will experience conditions of severe water stress by 2025. Three-quarters of African countries are expected to experience unstable water supplies, whereby small decreases in rainfall induce much larger reductions in streamflow.

Recent developments have seen forest landscape restoration (FLR) become widely recognized as an important means of not only restoring ecological integrity at scale but also generating additional local-to-global benefits. This handbook presents the Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM), which provides a flexible and affordable framework for countries to rapidly identify and analyse FLR potential and locate special areas of opportunity at a national or sub-national level.

Between 2012 and 2017, Vi Agroforestry and partners supported the development and implementation of the Lake Victoria Farmers’ Organisation Agroforestry (FOA) program. Under this program, and in cooperation with 40 member-based farmer organizations spread across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, approximately two million female and male farmers, school children and young people were mobilized to implement agroforestry and sustainable agriculture land management (SALM) practices in different agroecosystems of Lake Victoria catchment areas.

The Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley, Mexico, is the semiarid region with the richest biodiversity of North America and was recently recognized as a UNESCO’s World Heritage site. Original agricultural practices remain to this day in agroforestry systems (AFS), which are expressions of high biocultural diversity. However, local people and researchers perceive a progressive decline both in natural ecosystems and AFS.

In the highly populated and diverse tropics, conservation in relatively pristine habitats is important but clearly inadequate for sustaining the earth biological diversity. Agro-forestry systems such as shade-coffee plantations that incorporate arboreal vegetation are known to be more resilient for biodiversity conservation than other more drastic land transformations.

This report explores how forest and farm producer organisations (FFPOs) can best nurture youth and address youth migration. Youth (15-24 years of age) bring energy and innovation to forest and farm production systems. Of a total global youth population of 1.2 billion, 85% live in developing countries where they make up the mainstay of the rural workforce. Yet, 75% of youth are currently classified as underutilised (unemployed; in irregular or informal jobs; or outside of formal education and training).